El Serpiente del Eden
by Lady Jane Doe
Summary: Sometimes she wonders if opening the Chamber wasn’t all the diary was intended to do. Maybe it was meant to fall into the hands of someone like her: a young girl, foolish, heartbroken, longing for just a bit of solace somewhere that was never truly hers.


A/N: Insert standard disclaimer here. I do not own Harry Potter (that would be JK Rowling's property) and I am not profiting off of this in any way, shape, or form. Feedback is generally appreciated, concrit most of all. This is a one-shot, meaning there will be no more. I'm absolutely fixated on the idea of the effect that Tom Riddle would've had on an innocent and impressionable Ginny Weasley, and now I get to write it. This was mostly written at about two-thirty in the morning, so tell me if there's something I should fix. I apologize for the extreme shortness of it all. Gracias y ven otra vez.

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**El Serpiente del Eden**

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She can still remember the gentle, deceiving words he wrote to her once. How he told her that he'd always be there, he'd always listen, and she wanted to believe him. She did believe him. She really did. And because she believed him, she thinks that there's something missing in what she feels for Harry. _Where is the desperation,_ she asks herself, _where is the passion, where is the craving that's supposed to be there?_

And oh, she knows it's unhealthy, but she just can't help but close her eyes sometimes and see his smooth eyes that could lie to her so easily and hear the voice in her head again: _Of course I'll listen, tell me everything, you'll never have to worry about me, I'll never leave you, never ever._

He was right. He's never left her.

After so many years, even after seeing who he is and what he's become since the sixteen year old who came out of the diary, she still can't help but feel that infatuation, that feeling that's too primal and raw to explain properly to herself. It's a desperate, fierce yearning that can't quite be called love. Love transcends, it makes you better than who you are – and he never made her into a better person.

Sometimes she wonders if opening the Chamber wasn't all the diary was intended to do. Maybe it was meant to fall into the hands of someone like her: a young girl, foolish, heartbroken, longing for just a bit of solace somewhere that was never truly hers. Just so he could get into her head and stay there, manipulating her thoughts and her mind and her heart.

_Yes._

Because every time she thinks about him (and she tries not to, but it happens), she feels that sharp stab at her heart. It grew from the desperation and the yearning and the inevitable betrayal that he gave her in return for her secrets. She remembers spilling her heart out onto the pages of his diary, and how he listened patiently and never gave her unnecessary advice – because she never needed advice, she just needed someone to talk to – and how she trusted him implicitly, without him ever having to ask her.

She remembers crying to him in the night, and his reassurance that he would never go away. She remembers the day he pulled her through and she saw him, black-haired and inky-eyed and darkly amused. She remembers telling him about the blanks in her memory and how utterly frightened she was that all of the clues pointed to her as the attacker. She remembers how sometimes he'd crack the façade of sympathy and charming kindness and would say something sarcastic, something sharply and pointedly cruel and amused about someone who'd hurt her or upset her, and she'd laugh at his intelligence and his wit and she'd inwardly thrill that he was defending her. Most of all, she remembers the day when she wrote wistfully, "I wish you were real, Tom. I want to see you. I want to meet you really, not just write to you in a diary," and she could sense his hesitation in writing back, but when he did, what he said gave her a little jolt inside.

_"Perhaps someday, I can be real again, Ginny. Perhaps one day we shall meet outside these pages, and you can show me your world better that just transcribing it in a tattered old book."_

Maybe at eleven you don't know what desire is. But the sheer force of the infatuation that gripped her then was dizzying. She idolized Harry, but the first time that she felt those jumps in her stomach were with Tom. He listened to her, he confided in her, sometimes he terrified her, but she couldn't bear to be without him for too long. She tried not writing in the diary one day, but at the stroke of midnight she'd flipped the diary open and started scribbling apology after apology. His replies were hastily scrawled back: _Where were you? I missed you. I hate when you don't write, Ginny. You are my window to the world. You're the only one who talks to me, just like I'm the only one that understands you._ And little girl that she was, that just thrilled her to pieces, that someone as wonderful and brilliant and amazing as Tom had missed her, had told her that she was special to him. His dark charm enchanted her – literally and figuratively.

After that terrifying year, in the summer before her second year, she'd saved a little money and bought a cheap, ordinary diary of her own. She didn't tell anyone, especially not her family, because then they'd all fuss over her again and she didn't want that. She just wanted to write in a diary that was hers again. But it was hard, _so hard_, not to start every entry with _Dear Tom_, not to expect a response back from him, not to burst into tears whenever she reminded herself that she shouldn't be wishing she had him back.

He was never really hers, anyway. Maybe that's why she feels that heady rush when she thinks of him still, like she's losing herself completely in the curve of his smile and the slant of his eyes.

Maybe that's why she's so scared for Harry, irrationally and inexplicably, because not only does he have to face the thing that Tom's turned into, but he has to destroy it, too. And she wants Voldemort gone, there's no mistake about that.

It's just that sometimes, in the cradle of midnight when she's lying awake in her bed, she wants Tom back. And that manages to frighten her more than anything Tom ever did to her.


End file.
